Female assassin accused of killing pro-Putin blogger after giving him sculpture laden with explosives

A Russian female anti-war activist has been detained for allegedly blowing up a notorious pro-Putin blogger after handing him a sculpture laden with explosives inside a packed St. Petersburg café.

Russian’s Ministry of the Interior said Monday it had apprehended 26-year-old Daria Trepova in connection with the killing of Maxim Fomin, known by the pseudonym Vladlen Tatarsky.

The Kremlin labeled the high-profile assassination of Fomin a “terrorist act” organized by Ukraine with support from a group tied to imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny.        

Tatarsky was speaking at a political discussion taking place at Street Food Bar No. 1 when the eatery was rocked by a powerful blast that killed the blogger and injured more than 30 people, eight of them critically.

Surveillance video recorded a short time before the attack showed a light-haired woman in a long dark coat walking into the St. Petersburg café with a large cardboard box believed to have contained the figurine packed with explosives.

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Another video shot inside the café shows Tatarsky accepting the bust from Trepova.

“Oh, what a handsome guy! Is that me?” he asks after examining the plaster statuette, drawing applause from the crowd.

According to reporters, Tatarsky invited Trepova, who introduced herself as “Nastya,” to sit next to him, but the woman walked away, saying she was too “shy.”

A few minutes after that exchange, the bomb went off as Trepova was speeding away in a white Volkswagen Polo.

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The force of the blast shattered the cafe’s windows.

Footage of the aftermath showed bleeding victims stumbling out onto the street and ambulances responding.

Photos taken inside the eatery displayed what appeared to be a dead body lying amid bloodstained debris.

A native of the Ukrainian region of Dontesk, the 40-year-old Tatarsky had joined pro-Russian separatists and fought on Moscow’s side after spending time in prison on an armed robbery conviction.

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He later made a name for himself as a Telegram blogger with 500,000 followers, using his public platform to cheer on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces in Ukraine, while taking Russia’s military establishment to task for not pursuing the 13-month conflict even more aggressively.  

On one occasion, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Kherson after Russian troops retreated from the city in November, Tatarsky demanded to know why Moscow had not used that opportunity to assassinate him with a drone.

Tatarsky attended a ceremony in September, during which Putin formally annexed four regions of Ukraine. In a video recorded during the event at the Kremlin, the blogger said: “We’ll defeat everyone, we’ll kill everyone, and we’ll rob everyone we need to. Everything will be just as we like it.”

Tatarsky also had ties to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner mercenary group leading the fight to capture the key city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine.

Prigozhin, a catering mogul and close Putin ally, is also the former owner of the St. Petersburg café where the blast went off.

At the time of his death, Tatarsky was giving a talk to an audience of about 100 like-minded people as part of an event organized by the pro-war group Cyber Z Front.

The woman accused of killing the blogger, Trepova, is a Russian citizen who has previously been detained for protesting against the war, according to the state news agency TASS.  

Russian media reports said Trepova had been caught hiding in the St. Petersburg apartment of a friend of her husband’s and had planned to flee to Uzbekistan.

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Following her detention, the 26-year-old admitted during a videotaped interrogation to bringing the deadly gift to Tatarsky.

In the recording released Monday, an officer asks Trepova if she knows why she was taken into custody.

“Yes, I do,” she replies. 

“Why?” the officer inquires.

“For … I’d put it this way, for being at the assassination site of Vladlen Tatarsky,” Trepova says.

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The interrogator asks the woman what she had done, to which she replies with a deep sigh: “I brought there the statuette that exploded.” 

“Who gave it to you, that statuette?” the officer asks.

The woman sighs again, saying: “Please, can I tell you later?”

At the time of her detention, Trepova was reportedly quoted as telling police: “I was set up! They just used me!”

Her husband, Dmitry Rylov, who is believed to be out of the country, told an independent Russian media outlet, “I’m pretty sure she would never have been able to do something like that on her own. I am 100% sure that she would never have agreed to this if she had known,” reported the Times.

Court records cited by TASS indicated that Trepova, an art student, was detained on Feb. 24, 2022, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, for taking part in an unsanctioned anti-war demonstration.

The Kremlin characterized Tatarsky’s killing as a “terrorist act” and cited Russia’s Anti-Terrorism Committee in saying that there was evidence linking Ukraine to the bombing.

“The active phase of the investigation is now under way,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on a call with reporters. “We see quite vigorous steps to detain suspects. Let’s be patient and wait for the next announcements from our special services, which are working on this.”

The Anti-Terrorism Committee claimed, without offering proof, that Ukraine received help from members of the Anti-Corruption Fund, the organization founded by Navalny.

Russia’s hawkish politicians and commentators were quick to blame Ukraine’s intelligence services for Tatarsky’s death without providing any evidence to support the allegation.  

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Denis Pushilin, the Moscow-installed leader of the Donetsk province that Russia illegally annexed in the fall, said: “The Kyiv regime is a terrorist regime. It needs to be destroyed, there’s no other way to stop it.”

Ukraine did not claim responsibility for the killing, with a Ukrainian presidential aide suggesting that it was the work of internal forces.

Mykhailo Podolyak wrote on Twitter that it had only been a matter of time — “like the bursting of a ripe abscess” — before Russia became consumed by what he labeled “domestic terrorism.”

“Spiders are eating each other in a jar,” Podolyak added.

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Surprisingly, Prigozhin appeared to agree with Zelensky’s aide, saying he did not think it was the handiwork of Ukraine’s government.

“I think there is a group of radicals operating, which unlikely has something to do with the government,” he said.

The deadly attack on Tatarsky in the heart of Putin’s hometown deep within Russia comes eight months after the assassination of Darya Dugina, the journalist daughter of Alexander Dugin, a prominent far-right political philosopher.

Dugina was killed in a car bombing outside Moscow in August that was blamed on Ukraine, but Kyiv denied involvement.

Ilya Ponomarev, a former member of Russia’s State Duma now living in exile in Ukraine, claimed that an underground Russian partisan group calling itself the National Republican Army was responsible for the attack.

With Post wires